Policy Advocacy in Hard Times: The Impact of Economic Performance on Gendering Executive Attention

Abstract

Securing executive attention for new policy demands is notoriously difficult as governmental agendas are crowded by established or ‘core’ policy issues. This article investigates whether it is harder for new and costly policy issues to reach the government agenda when the economy is performing badly. It examines whether, and the extent to which, costly gender equality issues regarding women’s access to the labour market, equal treatment at work and care activities, are more likely to achieve executive attention when the economy is performing well. Using the Comparative Policy Agendas database, a systematic, quantitative analysis is conducted of when and why policies promoting sex equality in the division of labour reach executive agendas. The findings confirm that advocacy for costly gender equality measures is easier to make in times of economic growth. It is also found that female representation in parliament strengthens advocacy for executive attention and reduces friction on policy agenda change.

Acknowledgements

We thank Shaun Bevan, Frank Baumgartner, Will Jennings, Peter John and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments, as well as Kalle Stahl Nielsen for research assistance. Isabelle Engeli acknowledges the financial support of the Swiss National Science Foundation (project Ref. 105,511-119,245/1).

Notes

1. Another strand of research has highlighted the positive role of women’s policy agencies in promoting women-friendly policy outputs (see for instance McBride and Mazur 2010; McBride Stetson and Mazur 1995 as well as Weldon 2002).

2. More generally known as the Speech from the Throne or as the King’s Speech during the reign of a male monarch. UK Data Archives at Essex: SN 6974 – Legislative Policy Agendas in the United Kingdom, 1910–2010.

3. Output of the project Agenda Setting in Switzerland funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Ref. 105,511-119,245/1).

4. The four datasets were built up following the same master codebook of the Comparative Agendas Project. Each sentence or quasi-sentence was coded according to the coding scheme, with the exception of Switzerland for which the topic of the messages was used for the coding unit.

5. While focusing on gender equality regarding economic issues, we do not, therefore, attempt to assess the determinants of government attention to other aspects of gender equality related to, for instance, reproductive rights or domestic violence.

6. To give a general sense of the scarce attention dedicated to these gender equality issues, it is interesting to note that the mentions represent 0.29 per cent of the total mentions in the Dutch speeches, 0.33 per cent of the British speeches and 0.15 per cent of the Danish speeches.

7. Gender equality regarding work and caring activities is mentioned twice in six speeches and three times in only one speech.

8. The Danish prime minister’s speech for the year 1971 has been excluded from the analysis. Parliamentary elections took place a couple of weeks before the speech, which was delivered by the former prime minister heading the caretaker cabinet until the new coalition was formed. As the 1971 elections led to a drastic change in the party composition of the cabinet, it cannot be assumed that the speech reflects accurately the dynamics of attention of either the former cabinet or the succeeding one.

9. There is no longitudinal comparative data available regarding women’s participation in the workforce for the 1960s and 1970s. We have run analysis for the period where these data are available. The coefficient did not prove to be significant. We thus opted for preserving the longitudinal perspective from the beginning of the 1960s. The lack of longitudinal data for a sufficiently long period of time also prevented us from examining measures regarding public opinion toward the economy.

10. Cabinet shares held by Social Democrats is a common alternative measure used in the literature. Two main reasons have motivated our choice. First, the Social Democrats are systematically holding two seats (out of seven) in the Swiss permanent coalition cabinet. Relying on cabinet shares in the analysis would have resulted in artificial stability over time. Second, as Bonoli and Reber (2010) argue, opposition can play an important role in multi-party systems in vetoing policy proposals from a weakened government and push for placing issues upon the agenda. In an additional model excluding the Swiss observations, we substituted the cabinet share for the parliamentary seat share. As the results remained largely similar, we have opted for the parliamentary seat share in order to allow for as much variation as possible regarding the Swiss observations.

11. Carter and Signorino (2010) demonstrate that the use of a cubic polynomial of time performs as well as the natural cubic splines developed by Beck et al. 1998. In order to save space, we do not report time and country dummy coefficients in Table 2.